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| The Paris Correspondent of the Times has lately
| given us a sort of sketch of a speech, delivered in the
| French Senate, on what is called the Social Evil in Paris. It
| seems that a petition was presented on the subject, and
| that a Report was ordered, on the presentation of which M.
| Dupin spoke the speech of which we have an abstract, and
| which is, it appears, about to be published in full. We are
| not told who the petitioner was, or what exactly he prayed
| for, except that it was for a more direct interference on the
| part of the police with prostitution. Nor do we learn what
| the Committee reported or recommended, if they
| recommended anything; nor, indeed, does the abstract
| before us show very clearly to what practical point M.
| Dupin addressed himself, except that he seems to have
| objected to the petition. The whole thing, as we have it in
| the Times of Monday, is a specimen of the
| unintelligent way in which matters of interest are dealt with
| by the Times Correspondent; and though, from
| motives of prudery or prudence, the debate was conducted
| with closed doors, yet, as access of some sort of other was
| gained to M. Dupin’s observations, we might perhaps have
| been told a little more on the subject. If, as is said, the
| present French regime displays in all ranks of
| society a lowering of public morals, it would be very
| interesting to know how the Conscript Fathers treat one of
| the accredited signs of a falling Empire. As far as we can
| guess out the matter, the petition seems to have called
| attention to the excesses of public prostitution, and to have
| demanded either that new police regulations should be
| made, or that the existing ones should be more stringently
| carried out. To this M. Dupin replied that there was a point
| beyond which police interference would rather increase
| than repress the evil, and that the real matter to be dealt
| with was one which, being solely of a moral character, was
| beyond legislation ~~ namely, the luxury and the low tone
| of social morals prevalent in the higher classes. At least, if
| M. Dupin did not say this, being a sensible man, he might
| very well have said it; and if this were to be said in our
| Parliament, where it is not said, some good might come of
| it.
| Unless talkers and writers on this slippery subject bear
| carefully in mind this limit between the wholesome and the
| injurious effects of police interference, they only do more
| harm than good by discussing it. Vague talk about social
| evils is generally injurious, and serious thinkers are always
| repelled by philanthropic platitudes and heavy
| commonplaces in morality. Every special form under which
| the evil exhibits itself must be canvassed on its own
| grounds; but to recommend generally the prohibition of
| prostitution, or, on the other hand, to argue that all its
| details are to be regulated by law, is equally futile. Here, in
| England, the changes constantly taking place in society will
| always require vigilant attention to each exigency as it
| arises; and the complaint against our Home Office is not
| that it declines to propose new laws, but that it fails to see
| that cases are perpetually arising which fall under the spirit,
| even if they cannot be brought under the letter, of those
| existing safeguards which have already been found
| necessary to prevent glaring outrages on public decency.
| For example, here are two or three new forms of evil.
| There are the Priapeian Museums, together with the
| offensive placards and advertisements which infest certain
| public places. There is the public display of gaillard
| photographs. And these are the quack doctors. The
| last few years have given rise to these three monstrous
| births of time. It would be futile to enlarge on the evil of
| these things, and worse than futile to point out the lengths
| to which they are carried; nor is it necessary to argue that
| they fall within the general spirit of the existing law, which
| professes, and rightly professes, only to restrain the
| greater outrages on public decency. The only question is,
| would dealing with them involve worse evils than those
| actually existing? We cannot see how this can be even
| pretended. It is quite true that an attempt to suppress
| brothels has, as a matter of experience, produced other
| and worse excesses. But what would come of it were those
| dens of obscenity in the Strand and Tichborne Street
| closed by order of Sir George Grey? Of course, the liberty
| of the subject would be infringed; Magna Charta would be
| endangered, and the Bill of Rights seriously imperilled. Is
| such foolish pedantry as this to be listened to for a
| moment? So in the matter of obscene and dirty
| advertisements. What can be more easy than to bring
| every person who is advertised as the vendor of certain
| wares within Lord Campbell’s Act, and to make such public
| announcements, where an address is given, penal
| offences? The matter of questionable photographs, of
| course, is more difficult, and will always be open to
| conflicting decisions. But what at the present moment is
| complained of by sober people ~~ and no other complaints
| deserve to be attended to ~~ is the suspicion that there is
| supineness and stupidity in the official mind as to the new
| shapes which public indecency takes. Sir George Grey, by
| diligent search into the archives of the Home Office, can
| probably discover no authenticated instance of the
| successful prosecution of the proprietor of an anatomical
| museum. The public fail to perceive the cogency of the
| answer, though we cannot dispute the fact. No doubt the
| Government is right in expecting that the initiative should
| be taken by the public. Public morality is not outraged until
| there are complaints on the part of the public. It is neither
| to be expected nor desired that the State should undertake
| those duties which are best left to private persons. A
| nuisance is not a nuisance till somebody complains of
| being injured. Volenti non fit injuria. We do not
| want a paternal government in the sense of undertaking
| personal duties. The police authorities are quite right in
| saying that the case of Regent Street, for example, was, in
| the first instance, a matter for the inhabitants of Regent
| Street, and its improved state 9for it is improved) is due to r.
| Dolby and his friends undertaking that responsibility which
| Sir Richard Mayne very properly declined. The same may
| be said about the obscene museums. It will be time
| enough to ask for new legislation when the insufficiency of
| our present laws is proved. As matters stand, it may be
| reasonably expected that the Strand tradesmen ~~ and,
| we may especially add, the authorities of King’s College ~~
| should first move. If they fail ~~ and it is by no means
| certain that they would fail ~~ in suppressing this particular
| nuisance, we doubt whether new power would be refused
| to the police to deal with a new emergency.
| But, as reported, M. Dupin dealt with the matter on larger
| grounds. he seems to have said that the demi-monde
| was encouraged by the haut-monde; and
| we may add that what is true of Paris is true of London.
| Our real social evil is that the manners of courtezans are
| creeping into the very verge of the Court. The dress, the
| equipage, the language, and the tastes of Lais are the
| standard of respectability in its choicest haunts. It is now
| virtue which pays the homage to vice, and it seems to be
| daily becoming a settled thing that one of the best chances
| of becoming a wife is to adopt the airs and style of those
| who are not wives. Lais give hints to those who are to be
| the mothers of our peers and gentlemen of the next
| generation. It is these women, as M. Dupin says, who set
| the fashion to ladies of fashion. Now the question, and of
| course it is an interesting one, is whether there is anything
| new in all this? As far as dress goes, we rather doubt it. M.
| Dupin seems to rest a good deal on this, and utters a
| vehement tirade against crinoline, chiefly, however, on
| economical and sumptuary grounds. Just as Tertullian said
| that high heels were unchristian because they affected to
| add a cubit to the stature, so M. Dupin quotes the fable of
| the ox and the frog against hoop petticoats. A voluminous
| dress costs more than a scanty one; most of the wearers of
| swelling and trailing skirts cannot afford to buy them;
| therefore, the chances are that the wearers sell, or are
| ready to sell, their virtue to buy their petticoats. We
| question all this. There are of course cases, and many of
| them, in which worthless wives run up long milliners’ bills.
| But so they always did. There never was an age in which
| female dress was not extravagant either in quantity or
| material, or perhaps in both. We are all, alike, in England
| and France and America, very rich; and therefore it is
| nothing strange that female dress should be costly and
| extravagant. Nor, again, are we prepared to say that the
| present style of dress is especially and exceptionally
| immodest. We are not saying that purists cannot, and
| perhaps justly, find faults in this direction. But we are
| content to incur the imputation of being thought cynical
| when we venture to remark that all female dress is, and is
| meant to be ~~ that is, it is in its original conception ~~
| suggestive. Whether it be of the past or the present
| generation, classical or modern, of the East or West, there
| may be detected in it one common nature. It is natural that
| it should be so. To the pure all things are pure; the most
| innocent of maidens, and matrons are not made immodest
| by the dress, whatever it is, of the period. But to say this is
| not to say that the dress of every period has not a
| suggestive basis. Women being women in all lands and in
| all countries, female dress must be female dress. And,
| therefore, crinoline and all that belongs to it is not worse,
| and certainly is not better, than the style which went before
| it, or than the style which will follow it. Its real fault is not
| that it is expensive ~~ for we may as well have this form of
| expense as another; not that it is immodest ~~ for a certain
| whiff of immodesty may be found by the curious in all
| dress; but that it is singularly cumbrous and excessively
| dirty.
| The vice of our age, however, is not this; it is something
| more subtle and dangerous; and, unless we remembered
| that in the decline of Rome there must have been
| something like it which suggested to Horace his
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| we should have said that it was a new thing for chastity to
| copy the outward life of unchastity. Anyhow, the fast girl
| who has not lost her virtue, and does not intend to lose it,
| is a social evil far worse than the fast girl who has not, and
| does not pretend to have, any virtue at all. In English life
| this is a novelty. Belinda might be, and probably was, vain,
| silly, and frivolous; and her representatives in these days,
| with many more pretensions, are often as empty. But
| Belinda never dressed after and talked after Miss Kitty
| Fisher. And for this, which i the last and worst vice of
| modern society, the mothers are more responsible than the
| daughters. If the matrons and chaperones of the
| day permit, as they do, the gilded youth of the day to pass,
| without remark or censure, from the opera-box of Lais to
| the opera-box of the heiress of a half-hundred earls; if,
| without rebuke, the anecdotes and adventures of the
| demi-monde are reproduced as the small talk of the
| drawing-room; if jests fresh as imported from the free
| tongue of venal beauty are quoted on the croquet-ground
| and the lawn fete; and if the mothers permit, or
| perhaps encourage, all this, there is a blot on our morality
| which we had better look to in time. There are a good
| many awkward reasons for suspecting that, among many
| of our swaggers, that which claims for English women a
| pre-eminence in character above all the women of the
| earth is not the least audacious. Anyhow, the text on which
| M. Dupin addressed the French Senate might afford a
| profitable and savoury